Four Everything

Oh, I haven't written one of these self-indulgent autobiographical poems in a while.


Poetry as Punches (More Genuine Enthusiasm, Less Sentiment)
Sugarbaby, honeydear obligated audience: here are the facts mapped as tidily as cobalt isotope tables and yellow fever charts:
I swear to Jesus, sometimes you can’t tell if they’re about to throw up or laugh
and I was never very good at telling the difference with disastrous results
and some people say I’m a series of disastrous results, but one time I caught a hummingbird and it burned in my hands like an ember and when I was younger I used to start fires outside my Presbyterian church
but now that I’m older I plan to start them on the inside
(and not to diss my home state but flannel ain’t much of an export) and
in the depths of the fullness of my heart I’m afraid I’m utterly unlovable, I used to want to be a nun
so someone would be obliged to be there when I start drooling into my Ovaltine.
You know what I’m saying?
You know what I’m saying.

Because postmodernism means getting to say here is the insides and the complications;
the pain laid out as sharp and as abstract as cubic zirconium and
all this glints like the light in the eyes of Medusa’s dead snakes.
I’m afraid but not ashamed, just afraid, because this poem goes ratatatat in all the wrong tempos and
I remember this violin recording where you could hear her breathing
but I can’t remember my mother’s mother.
Look.

I want the revolution but I also want things like modern dentistry and rubberized hair ties..
I don’t really like feminism. Does that make me a bad feminist?
I didn’t start liking music until Joe Strummer muttered to me that hardcore could use more handclaps and less handholding.
I don’t think that just because you’ve started cupping cigarettes in the curve of your hands and acting awful tough lately makes you a real adult.
I didn’t do any of those things they tell you I did, it’s all dirty lies, I’m respectable now.
I don’t wish harm on any of you, really. I just want what I want more than magnets want iron and more than the body desires resurrection, even from six feet under.
I didn’t use to believe in the Holy Spirit, until I felt her breath on my shoulders. It’s like four again, and August again.
I don’t regret coating the glass walls with love poems scotch taped up for you, you, you; only that you never bothered to read them.
I didn’t read the rest, but that didn’t stop Leaves of Grass from pissing me off for two weeks.
I don’t get me wrong. I believe in many beautiful things. I just don’t really want to talk about them. The truest things are inarticulate.
I didn’t go to the show because I didn’t want to spend eighty bucks and a Tuesday night on standing on concrete for the off chance I might touch Jon Bon Jovi’s thigh. That’s just not who I am.